This October we are celebrating our sometimes-scary lupine characters. Thérèse Tillard, a French librarian, speaks about the enduring appeal of Wolfy below.
Children love to play at being scared. The fear of the wolf (or of the dark, or of the monster) is essential
to the development of children’s minds between 4 and 7 years. Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim says,
Fairytales don’t traumatize young readers. They answer precisely and irrefutably to the children’s and
teenagers’ anxieties
In the child’s subconscious the wolf is the one that will eat them, the one that will separate them from
people they love. The wolf is a recurrent character in fairytales and it is always THE villain. However,
in the last 20 years, we’ve seen children’s books in which the wolf is friendly – or even ridiculous.
In Wolfy, Grégoire Solotareff takes the wolf and makes him both villainous and a friend. That is what
made and still makes Wolfy success…
Wolf books by Gecko Press
